Are survivors supposed to have fun in this game anymore?

The first hit is easy, and catching up with power is something only good ghoul players can do, but it all comes down to resource preservation. You know that an enraged ghoul is 100% gonna hit you, so don't waste resources, circle around a tall prop so its harder to get hit, but you also don't lose a pallet. You need pallets for when you are injured, healing against him is pointless since he is essentially a hit and run killer, so don't waste your time healing. For catching up woth swings, you can actually double back when the killer leaps, most leap with only one token though so they can try ti catch up again

For basekit changes, he needs to recieve the following: Reduction to his aim assist and locking onto unintended actions (vaults and survivors), greatly reduced enraged countdown, reduced speed when performing leaps (alleviate some frustration with insta lock hits by givingmore reaction time)

Just simple ideas and basic counterplay so far, obviously not reliable in solo queue since most people tend to turn their brains off when gaming, but you can do this and help educate others

This is what I tried to explain with Chucky. Just because the killer slides through pallet doesn't make them a guaranteed downer. You can still predict, even react, to that as a survivor. Wesker can do it, and nobody complains about it. Why? Because he slows down so much from the slide, the survivor always has a chance to loop back around anyway. Chucky and his 110% self was the same way before his nerf. Kaneki does the exact same thing, except he has a more lenient cooldown before he gets back to max walk speed, so that the loops are at least slightly more fair when the killer uses their anti-loop ability... to anti-loop.

The relationship we have with BHVR is quite... unique. Half the community calls them survivor mains (including me), and the other half calls them killer mains (literally, how?), and constantly complain, to where they're always scrambling to make good balance changes and avoid further criticism, leading to them releasing bad balance changes, people complain, which begins the cycle again. Normally, I'd be against such casual, demanding criticism of a developer. But they clearly don't know what they're doing.

They've created a feedback loop of bad balancing and bad matchmaking, because you have to have a good matchmaking system to know what to balance. Their MMR is screwed up and puts random people against each other, but the devs have convinced themselves that it's putting equal skilled people against each other, therefore whatever is complained about needs to be nerfed. That almost always happens to be something on the killer side, because without a consistently skilled team, the killer is always able to exploit the weak links and win, creating the illusion that killers are overpowered. It's like putting 2 survivors who are actually trying in with 2 who aren't, and the killer is actually trying. Who do you think is gonna win if the game is based on all 5 players knowing what they're doing. So the devs balance for the most casual of survivors, to where even the ones who don't know what they're doing actually have a chance to beat the good killer player, even though they're getting downed really really fast.

Anyway, I agree with you that they need to let the new killer sit, especially in a community known for blowing things out of proportion to protect and prop up the most casual among us. To nerf the killer this soon after his release, not even giving it a week or a month so that people can develop skills with him and develop counterplay against him, it's unheard of in the gaming space, the sheer entitlement of it. And because it's survivor mains levying these complaints, the immediate conclusion is "This killer's OP. You have to disprove how he's not." I prefer the killer style of critiquing killers, where you weigh actual strengths and weaknesses, and how they play out in a match, and THEN conclude if the killer is too strong or not. I'm tired of this unquestioned balance scheme of the survivors complaining, "He too fast. He too strong. Me rage quit. Nerf him." And the devs do it, purely because of ad populum.

The devs have got to forget about pandering to these ultra casuals, who know nothing of balance, if they're ever going to keep the more competitive players interested. That, or create DBD: Weenie Hut Jr. Edition, where every survivor wish is fulfilled, and if the killer AI is too strong they'll just nerf it.

I've felt this way for a while now that this is the "intended" way to play DBD, and my own playstyle matches it both sides. I really don't care about escaping as Survivor, but I do care about trying to get as many kills as I can as Killer (even if that's just one kill). I think that's fine and good but if so, like I said… it isn't working and it's because the game's win/loss state and reward system does not FEEL casual. It feels competitive. I'm not sure how we fix that though, because while it's not fair to expect Survs to feel like loss is the default, it's equally not fair to constantly shaft the weaker Killers in the roster - your C's and D's - by making them compete with stuff meant for Killers like Nurse and Blight.